How I misspent my European vacation

But then I remembered the first tuition bill for our younger son's fall semester, which was sitting in our dining room, unpaid. I pondered the fact that our older son would always need financial support, and that we had at least five more years with our 13-year-old, which translates into $6,000 worth of pizza alone. And I became exactly who I'd always been: the dull, penurious, unadventurous mom.

"I can't do that," I said. "We need to figure out a way to make this money last."

There was one weepy, melodramatic moment when I offered to let John off the hook. We were, I told him, looking for entirely different things out of life. He should go on, have a great time in Italy. I would fly home and raise the three on my own -- which is what I'd intended to do up until the day he proposed.

"Don't be stupid," he said gently, taking the wine glass from my hand. "I think you've had enough to drink."

Indeed, the bottle was gone.

By the time we rose for dinner, we'd come up with a rough and severely scaled-back new plan. By cutting out two cities, we could make our original budget work. That and we would have enough to splurge on dinner. We walked to a nearby trattoria in renewed spirits, opening the door to a scented cloud of garlic, balsamic vinegar and roasted sage.

The place smelled wonderful, but even at 8 o'clock on a Thursday night, it was nearly empty. We sat at a corner table and ordered a flask of house wine out of courtesy; neither of us needed more. In fact, I was suddenly downright woozy. And after my first sip, the room began to spin.

I needed food. Immediately. The waiter arrived to take our order and set a basket of dry bread on the table. I picked up a slice and asked if I might have a plate and some olive oil. That's when there was a clattering, stick-splitting noise -- like a fence post breaking.

It was the owner, a man like Pinocchio's Stromboli: beefy, red-faced and mustached. He stood over me, hot breath on my head, barrel stomach pushing into my chair. "You order now!" he shouted, pointing at our menus, which were entirely in Italian with no English words underneath.

I had taken only a single bite of bread, so was still on the faintly nauseous side of drunk. But I put it down and picked up our translation guide. "OK, but I need to figure out ..."

"You order now!" This time it was a bellow. Everyone in the room turned to look. The man bumped my chair again and reached over my shoulder to bonk the menu with a finger like a fat cigar: antipasto, primo, secondo, contorno. He hit each category in turn. "You order. I am not in business of bread. You order now, or I call police."

In the United States, where I work as a restaurant critic, I would have written him off as a drunkard or a lunatic. I might have stood, thrown a few bills on the table, and walked out of the place. Or, as a friend suggested later, eaten the dinner peaceably, then called my credit card company to tell it what happened and insist that the charges be reversed. But I did none of these things.

Head spinning from the wine, off my game because English words -- my stock in trade -- were of no use, I did something entirely out of character. I apologized. Pointing to menu items that looked right, I weakly repeated my standard Italian phrase: Sono allergia ai funghi. "I am allergic to mushrooms."

The man sneered and nodded. Five minutes later, our food was dumped on the table in front of us, everything at once. The only sounds were forks clattering and a conversation in German at a four-top by the wall. We ate dutifully, like prisoners being watched.

That night, I awoke at 3 a.m., violently ill. The town was silent and dark. There was no one to call.

John and I spent the next week staying in small rented rooms and shopping in markets rather than going out. This saved money and ensured that we would never again go through an experience like Orvieto. And it was lovely, really: We sat on a double bed in a seaside room in Riomaggiore, a paper-thin towel spread between us, with a picnic of real prosciutto, soft taleggio cheese, fresh bread and blood oranges that dripped with juice.

Yet, as hard as I tried, I couldn't enjoy the romance of this without a parade of niggling doubts. I was stopping in tobacco shops all over Italy to buy phone cards so I could call the kids, worried that I'd left them motherless too long. This business of trampling through ancient cities with no goal in mind seemed slightly self-indulgent. And so much of what we'd seen -- around the Vatican particularly -- struck me as manipulative and Disney-fied. Plaster Pietà doorstops, light-up Pope Benedicts, Jesus-on-a-stick.

Often, we would find ourselves completely surrounded by other tourists: Asian men photographing their wives on bridges, gaggles of blond women from Texas, swarming groups of high school students with bored eyes and Celtic cross tattoos. We had gone to all this expense and trouble in order to experience a different culture. Yet a huge number of the people we encountered looked exactly like us: Americans toting guidebooks, fretting about the price of the euro and looking for deals. I was still wary, but part of me began to grow angry on the behalf of Italians, even the oaf from Orvieto. After dodging slow-moving sightseers all over Florence, I was ready to poison a few myself.

Next page: Perhaps, I thought, our trip was the turning point